Page 27 of The Mars House

“It—no, I don’t need to be refrigerated,” January said, choking over another laugh he hadn’t seen coming. “I don’t want to feel like I owe you.”

Gale lifted both hands a fraction off the table. “I understand, but this isn’t a debt to repay; this is me making sure a member of my House is safe.”

“You can’t spend all that money and not want something back.”

Gale straightened a little as if January had sworn at them, and he realized too late that refusing a gift was probably very rude.

At last they said, politely, “As a percentage of my annual income, putting up one quite small human in a hotel for a month is like you buying someone a coffee.”

“It’s a five-star hotel!” It was named after an early space station—Tiangong meant “the palace of the heavens,” and it was a big name to live up to, but given the macarons-and-celebrities situation, January wasn’t sure he even wanted to imagine what one of its guest rooms would look like. Probably they had their own private waterfalls and hula dancers on demand.

“I’m . . . rich.”

“That rich, really?” It came out slightly flat, slightly disapproving. He shook his head once, trying convey that he didn’t mean to be rude, and he didn’t want to get in another fight, but he was just as unwilling to take it back altogether. People should be disapproving of that kind of money sitting under one person. And the Gales of the worlds needed to see that being great didn’t automatically mean good in everyone’s mind, despite the flocks of adoring teenagers.

But now that he was saying it to Gale personally, not just whingeing at Val, it didn’t sound so much like it was just his opinion. It sounded like he was preaching. In a weird, vivid spin of perspective, he heard suddenly how people like him sounded to people like Gale. Righteous, holier-than-thou-ing.

Gale nodded and didn’t complain. He wasn’t sure he would have been that graceful if someone had been so spiky with him. “Does that mean yes?”

“Yes. Thank—”

“Ah,” Gale cut him off.

January hesitated. “This . . . is . . . only my due from House Gale and if you’d withheld it I’d be talking to the union and everybody would think badly of you?”

“Better,” Gale said, and they both laughed the muted laugh of two people who still didn’t understand each other, even though they’d got a bit of string and a couple of tin cans over the gulf now. It was silly, but January’s heart lifted, because he had come here thinking Gale would be dismissive and patronising. Not that they would be searching for more string and more cans just as hard as he was.

“So that’s the wedding,” January said. “And then . . . ?”

Gale drew in a deeper breath. “Then we have a schedule for developing the relationship.” They were holding the idea with pincers, and they had clearly gone to a lot of effort not to leave a long quiet before relationship as they geared up to the word. January was glad the two of them agreed about how uncomfortable that whole idea was, though it was hard not feel grimy. He would have liked not to be repulsive. “Being married is one thing, but what will stoke much more interest is if we can appear to make it work. You can read this yourself. It’s not scripted, but it is choreographed.”

January read the schedule, nodding. It made sense. Meetings, lunch together, fundraisers, rallies, and in between, rather well-considered suggestions for him specifically: filming online dancing lessons for exercise at home, culture slots about Europe, quirks of British English, teaching basic English—by that point the communications department clearly thought people would be interested—and more, and more.

And then, near Christmas, a month before the election, something that was cryptically marked “start of romance day.”

His heart clenched up in the same way it had when Lovely Mark at the naturalisation centre had flirted with him. It was a kind of nascent panic, and all at once he wanted to dissolve into the air. He could perform, he could even act a bit, but what Gale was talking about was beyond acting. It was a whole life. A whole marriage.

“Do I want to know what that means?” he asked tightly.

Gale looked like he felt. “Well, my press secretary wants something steamy and I want whatever the opposite of that is, and I expect we’ll have to compromise with something kind of swampy in the middle.”

Usually he had a good grip on his imagination, but it got right away from him then, and his head filled with feverish, horrible possible futures where he would have to sleep with someone he didn’t know live on a reality show in front of four million people. All of them had sharp, dark edges, and each one was lacerating. His lungs decided that they wouldn’t be working again until he could stop thinking of that, thank you.

He must have gone an even worse colour than normal, because a flash of worry went through Gale’s eyes, and they reached across the table. They didn’t cover his hands, but they held theirs an inch above his. “No. Not that. No one is going to ask you to do anything like . . .”

He finally managed to breathe in again. “What is the opposite of steam, anyway?” he asked, just to try to steer away from everything else. “Is it—you know, arid tundra full of hungry polar bears?”

“Everyone likes polar bears, so I don’t see how my press secretary can get mad about that,” Gale agreed, looking halfway to relieved. They took their hands back.

Then they blinked twice and touched the table.

“Are you—” He stopped himself saying “all right.” Gale would hate it. “Something going on?” he asked instead.

“Yes. We’re trending.”

January studied them, intrigued. There were things here called haptic engines. They were clever webs that were implanted over certain parts of your brain, and what they did was pretty amazing. The translation ones were the least of it. Others let you feel social media tides, or stock market ones, and in hospitals you could link them to a doctor’s so the doctor could feel exactly what kind of pain you were in, and in some very fancy restaurants you could look at a code on the menu and the haptic would fire up and trick your neurones into making you taste a tiny sample of the dish; but he’d never met anyone with them. Everyone said it was the future of the internet, but for now, they were fantastically expensive.12 He put his phone face down on the table, glad he could do that. It would be nightmarish having it plugged directly into his mind. As far as he knew, the implants ran on the electricity of the rest of your brain. You couldn’t turn them off any more than you could turn off your hearing.

Gale saw. “You must struggle if you’re only perceiving things with a phone. That must be an antique? Xie,” they added, because the waiter had just delivered two cups of beautiful coffee and a heat pack for January.